1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention pertain to virtual machines.
2. Related Art
The advantages of virtual machine technology have become widely recognized. Among these advantages is the ability to run multiple virtual machines on a single host platform. This makes better use of the capacity of the hardware, while still ensuring that each user enjoys the features of a “complete” computer. Depending on how it is implemented, virtualization can also provide greater security, since the virtualization can isolate potentially unstable or unsafe software so that it cannot adversely affect the hardware state or system files required for running the physical (as opposed to virtual) hardware.
As is well known in the field of computer science, a virtual machine (VM) is an abstraction—a “virtualization”—of an actual physical computer system. FIG. 1 shows one possible, arrangement of a computer system 700 that implements virtualization. A virtual machine (VM) or “guest” 200 is installed on a “host platform,” or simply “host,” which will include system hardware, that is, a hardware platform 100 of computer system 700, and one or more layers or co-resident components comprising system-level software, such as an operating system or similar kernel, or a virtual machine monitor or hypervisor (see below), or some combination of these. The system hardware typically includes one or more processors 110, memory 130, some form of mass storage 140, and various other devices 170. Additionally, an operating system, such as Commercial Operating System 420, and hosted application(s) 430, is shown with an optional coupling to system hardware 100.
Each VM 200 will typically have both virtual system hardware 201 and guest system software 202. The virtual system hardware typically includes at least one virtual CPU 210, virtual memory 230, at least one virtual disk 240, and one or more virtual devices 270. Note that a disk—virtual or physical—is also a “device,” but is usually considered separately because of the important role of the disk. All of the virtual hardware components of the VM 200 may be implemented in software using known techniques to emulate the corresponding physical components. The guest system software 202 includes a guest operating system (OS) 220 and drivers 224 as needed for the various virtual devices 270.
Note that a single VM 200 may be configured with more than one virtualized processor. To permit computer systems to scale to larger numbers of concurrent threads, systems with multiple CPUs have been developed. These symmetric multi-processor (SMP) systems are available as extensions of the PC platform and from other vendors. Essentially, an SMP system is a hardware platform that connects multiple processors to a shared main memory and shared I/O devices. Virtual machines may also be configured as SMP VMs. FIG. 1, for example, illustrates multiple virtual processors 210-0, 210-1, . . . , 210-m (VCPU0, VCPU1, . . . , VCPUm) within the VM 200.
Yet another configuration is found in a so-called “multi-core” architecture, in which more than one physical CPU is fabricated on a single chip, with its own set of functional units (such as a floating-point unit and an arithmetic/logic unit ALU), and can execute threads independently; multi-core processors typically share only very limited resources, such as some cache. Still another technique that provides for simultaneous execution of multiple threads is referred to as “simultaneous multi-threading,” in which more than one logical CPU (hardware thread) operates simultaneously on a single chip, but in which the logical CPUs flexibly share some resource such as caches, buffers, functional units, etc.
If the VM 200 is properly designed, applications 260 running on the VM 200 will function as they would if run on a “real” computer, even though the applications are running at least partially indirectly, that is via the guest OS 220 and virtual processor(s) 210-0, 210-1, . . . , 210-m. Executable files will be accessed by the guest OS 220 from the virtual disk 240 or virtual memory 230, which will be portions of the actual physical disk 140 or memory 130 allocated to that VM. Once an application 260 is installed within the VM 200, the guest OS 220 retrieves files from the virtual disk 240 just as if the files had been pre-stored as the result of a conventional installation of the application 260. The design and operation of virtual machines, such as VM 200, are well known in the field of computer science.
Some interface is generally required between the guest software within a VM 200 and the various hardware components and devices in the underlying hardware platform 100. This interface—which may be referred to generally as “virtualization software”—may include one or more software components and/or layers, possibly including one or more of the software components known in the field of virtual machine technology as “virtual machine monitors” (VMMs) 300, . . . , 300-n, “hypervisors,” or virtualization “kernels” 600. Because virtualization terminology has evolved over time and has not yet become fully standardized, these terms do not always provide clear distinctions between the software layers and components to which they refer. For example, “hypervisor” is often used to describe both a VMM 300 and a kernel 600 together, either as separate but cooperating components or with one or more VMMs 300, . . . , 300-m incorporated wholly or partially into the kernel 600 itself; however, “hypervisor” is sometimes used instead to mean some variant of a VMM 300 alone, which interfaces with some other software layer(s) or component(s) to support the virtualization. Moreover, in some systems, some virtualization code is included in at least one “superior” VM 200 to facilitate the operations of other VMs. Furthermore, specific software support for VMs 200, . . . , 200-n may be included in the host OS itself.
Moreover, FIG. 1 shows virtual machine monitors 300, . . . , 300-n that appear as separate entities from other components of the virtualization software. Furthermore, some software components used to implemented one illustrated embodiment of the invention are shown and described as being within a “virtualization layer” located logically between all virtual machines and the underlying hardware platform and/or system-level host software. This virtualization layer can be considered part of the overall virtualization software, although it would be possible to implement at least part of this layer in specialized hardware. The illustrated embodiments are given only for the sake of simplicity and clarity and by way of illustration—as mentioned above, the distinctions are not always so clear-cut.
The various virtualized hardware components in the VM, such as the virtual CPU(s) 210-0, 210-1, . . . , 210-m, the virtual memory 230, the virtual disk 240, and the virtual device(s) 270, are shown as being part of the VM 200 for the sake of conceptual simplicity. In actuality, these “components” are usually implemented as software emulations 330 included in the VMM 300. One advantage of such an arrangement is that the VMM 300 may (but need not) be set up to expose “generic” devices, which facilitate VM 200 migration and hardware platform-independence.
Different systems may implement virtualization to different degrees—“virtualization” generally relates to a spectrum of definitions rather than to a bright line, and often reflects a design choice with respect to a trade-off between speed and efficiency on the one hand and isolation and universality on the other hand. For example, “full virtualization” is sometimes used to denote a system in which no software components of any form are included in the guest other than those that would be found in a non-virtualized computer; thus, the guest OS 220 could be an off-the-shelf, commercially available OS with no components included specifically to support use in a virtualized environment.
In contrast, another concept, which has yet to achieve a universally accepted definition, is that of “para-virtualization.” As the name implies, a “para-virtualized” system is not “fully” virtualized, but rather the guest is configured in some way to provide certain features that facilitate virtualization. For example, the guest in some para-virtualized systems is designed to avoid hard-to-virtualize operations and configurations, such as by avoiding certain privileged instructions, certain memory address ranges, etc. As another example, many para-virtualized systems include an interface within the guest that enables explicit calls to other components of the virtualization software.
For some, para-virtualization implies that the guest OS 220 (in particular, its kernel) is specifically designed to support such an interface. According to this view, having, for example, an off-the-shelf version of Microsoft Windows XP as the guest OS 220 would not be consistent with the notion of para-virtualization. Others define para-virtualization more broadly to include any guest OS 220 with any code that is specifically intended to provide information directly to any other component of the virtualization software. According to this view, loading a module such as a driver designed to communicate with other virtualization components renders the system para-virtualized, even if the guest OS as such is an off-the-shelf, commercially available OS not specifically designed to support a virtualized computer system. Unless otherwise indicated or apparent, this invention is not restricted to use in systems with any particular “degree” of virtualization and is not to be limited to any particular notion of full or partial (“para-”) virtualization.
In addition to the sometimes fuzzy distinction between full and partial (para-) virtualization, two arrangements of intermediate system-level software layer(s) are in general use—a “hosted” configuration and a non-hosted configuration (which is shown in FIG. 1). In a hosted virtualized computer system, an existing, general-purpose operating system forms a “host” OS that is used to perform certain input/output (I/O) operations, alongside and sometimes at the request of the VMM 300. The Workstation product of VMware, Inc., of Palo Alto, Calif., is an example of a hosted, virtualized computer system, which is also explained in U.S. Pat. No. 6,496,847 (Bugnion, et al., “System and Method for Virtualizing Computer Systems,” 17 Dec. 2002).
As illustrated in FIG. 1, in many cases, it may be beneficial to deploy VMMs 300, . . . , 300-n on top of a software layer—a kernel 600—constructed specifically to provide efficient support for the VMs 200, . . . , 200-n. This configuration is frequently referred to as being “non-hosted.” Compared with a system in which VMMs 300, . . . , 300-n run directly on the hardware platform, use of a kernel 600 offers greater modularity and facilitates provision of services (for example, resource management) that extend across multiple virtual machines. Compared with a hosted deployment, a kernel 600 may offer greater performance because it can be co-developed with the VMM 300 and be optimized for the characteristics of a workload consisting primarily of VMs/VMMs. The kernel 600 also handles any other applications running on it that can be separately scheduled, as well as a console operating system that, in some architectures, is used to boot the system and facilitate certain user interactions with the virtualization software.
Note that the kernel 600 is not the same as the kernel that will be within the guest OS 220—as is well known, every operating system has its own kernel. Note also that the kernel 600 is part of the “host” platform of the VM/VMM as defined above even though the configuration shown in FIG. 1 is commonly termed “non-hosted;” moreover, the kernel may be both part of the host and part of the virtualization software or “hypervisor.” The difference in terminology is one of perspective and definitions that are still evolving in the art of virtualization.
General Purpose Computing and Security
General-purpose computers are used in countless applications in modern life. Almost irrespective of the specific nature of the application, it is more cost-effective and faster to develop a solution around the general-purpose computer, rather than attempting to build specialized circuitry to accomplish the task. Further, using general-purpose computers allows developers to take advantage of many existing tools, both for product development, and for system administrative tasks. This flexibility is both beneficial and problematic.
In many applications, is not desirable that a user should have completely uninhibited access to the computer. In some situations, such as a public library workstation, the user is only intended to interact with a very limited number of tools, such as the library's electronic card catalog. In such a case, the flexibility and power of the general-purpose computer need to be locked down; the computer becomes essentially a single purpose machine. In other situations, such as an office environment with many identical computers, it may be desirable to have homogenous configurations on every machine. Here, while the user may be allowed to access a variety of tools, his ability to alter the configuration of the general-purpose computer needs to be inhibited.